


Shadow

by sister_wolf



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Dead Robins, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-07
Updated: 2006-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sister_wolf/pseuds/sister_wolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Half-asleep and dreaming, he sometimes has flashes of a life before the pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> Set during Jason's post-resurrection, mostly-amnesiac time on the street.

His world is bound by pain on all sides. His head is a low, constant throb of pain, flaring up unexpectedly into blinding agony. His left arm, covered in scars that he doesn't remember getting, aches whenever the weather is cold and wet. His hip and back hurt from sleeping on concrete; in the morning, he finds greenish bruises where his hipbones press against the skin. Worse, though, is the pain in his mind, full of thoughts that he can't quite grasp, memories that he can't quite understand.

Half-asleep and dreaming, he sometimes has flashes of a life before the pain. A dark-haired older man-- his father?-- smiling at him in warm golden light. The same man surrounded by shadows, devoured by them; the man opens his mouth to say his name but a bat flies from his lips instead. Another man, dark-haired but younger, flies past with his laughter trailing behind him as a ribbon of solid blue.

There is other laughter in his dreams sometimes, a maniacal cackle rising and falling unexpectedly like gusts of wind; those are the nights when he sits huddled against the wall with a bare knife in his hand, waiting for the dawn.

He isn't sure how long he's been in this place, in this tangle of alleyways and crooked streets. He knows, somehow, that this isn't his home, though he can't quite remember where home is. _(flash of streetlights on a shiny black car, red roses on bare concrete, flutter of wings in the night)_ But the instincts that drive him to find a defensible place to sleep, to shoplift food that won't spoil quickly, and to avoid being picked up by the cops feel natural, like it's something he's always known how to do. He figures that probably he's always been on the streets, and that the sense-memories of soft cotton sheets and strong, gentle hands are just as delusive as the occasional flashes of flying above the city on golden wings.

The streets are full of victims, and it turns out that the urge to protect is even stronger than the instinct to keep his head down and survive. He finds himself fighting guys bigger than himself, guys armed with knives or guns, and finding that his body remembers how to fight even if he can't remember learning how to. He doesn't know how to deal with the gratitude of the people he saves, so he makes a habit of disappearing as quickly as he can, fading into the shadows like... like someone else. He can't remember. _(the cape is black on black, heavy and cool against his skin)_

The written word is meaningless to him, just random marks on paper, and so he doesn't learn that he's become a news item until he overhears two streetwalkers gossiping about a new vigilante in old Bludhaven. The newspapers have dubbed him the Shadow. He wants to ask them what else the newspapers are saying about him, but he knows that he can't. Words fly away from him like birds when he tries to grasp them, confusing whatever he tries to say into incoherence. He hates the half-pitying, half-terrified looks that his garbled speech gets him, and so he's learned not to talk at all. Apparently his silence is part of what's gained him the name Shadow, along with his habit of disappearing before the people he saves can get a good look at him.

He supposes it's as accurate a name as anything.


End file.
